The Aeronaut
by Night2Fall
Summary: The interviewer, on his way back from Finland, meets with an airship scout and learns about the struggles of the European Air Fleet. Rated T for, well, zombies, anyone?


Disclaimer: I don't own World War Z. Sort of necessary to point that out, right?

* * *

**Vaalajarvi, Finland**

**[Janina Wirth has just returned from a trip in her small scouting blimp. When we meet, she is still in her flight attire: a long, leather trench coat over her BDU, an old-fashioned pilot helmet with goggles and a faded red scarf. All, she explains with a grin, to create "a sort of steam-punk look, because I can". The _Mauro Altieri_ has left me at the local airship-tower two days ago, but the chance to speak to the woman, whom the soldiers and technicians only refer to as "The Aeronaut" has enticed me to stay. We sit down in the cafeteria. Right outside the window, one of the dirigibles is being refueled and we both look on in silent fascination.]**

They are quite the beauties, wouldn't you say? Every time I see an airship passing by, I can't help but admire how such an enormous vessel can be this graceful and silent. And that's after years building, maintaining and flying them. I'll admit they would never be anyone's first choice to ride out the apocalypse and no one survived solely in an airship, but they were, are and will continue to be very useful in combating zed.

Zombies don't usually look to the sky, if you don't attract their attention by some other means. Even during the war, the airships were running with electrical engines that made them nearly impossible to hear back on the ground. They are big, fat submarines of the sky against a foe that doesn't have sonar and doesn't know how to make it. It makes them incredible scouts and very useful for scavenging, if you know how to go about it. It made them lifesavers and that is how they will be remembered in Europe.

The military has repurposed them, especially in this modern, rather zed-free day and age. This one here **[she points to the airship on the fueling dock]** is a horde maker. She will be going into the Lake District, make a big ruckus, get attention, gather the stragglers into a nice big swarm and lead them towards Tampere, where the infantry is waiting. Perfectly safe and much faster at sweeping large areas than ground forces, whether they have dogs or not. Airship crews don't shoot, not since the official end of the war. It just spreads out Battlefield Sanitation. We didn't have these restrictions in wartime, obviously.

Now, as they are just _that_ stupidly useful against zeds, one cannot help but wonder why more weren't used in the war effort. Numerous factors.

First, you need to realize that they would actually _be_ that useful and start pouring resources into the manufacturing. Which is a huge point, because airships are not really state of the art technology. Especially with ravenous zed-heads at the gates and hardly enough food to last through the winter, they are not the first project you'd easily free up men and materials for. Second, as I just said, you need to have the resources and know-how to build and maintain them. Easier said than done, you need lifting gas, you need an envelope that can handle the pressure, you need engines, you need people who can assemble all the parts. Third, you need people who can fly the things reliably and there were hardly any of those around at the start of the war, because operational airships were a rarity. And fourth, you need a favorable environment. Your Army, for example, never used airships for scouting until the Road to New York, because it was neigh impossible to get them over the Rocky Mountains and establishing a beachhead in the east was way down on anyone's priority list. And even then, Army Group Center had to dance around tornados in the mid-west and Army Group North had to shelf their airships for the entirety of winter, due to storms, hail and snow.

**But the safe zone you were in met all these requirements?**

Yes, it did. The small city of Aachen on the western German border, where the trijunction used to be[1]. It had a huge technical university, that checked materials, manpower and the innovative thinking, it was a common starting ground for balloon-tours over the Eifel, so the environment was favorable and there were people like me around who kind-of, sort-of knew what they were doing when it came to airships, and it had the necessary peace and quiet to even begin the project.

**But Aachen was not a safe zone, was it?**

Not conceptionally, no. The fact that it survived at all is a statistic anomaly. The city had the Eifel at its back, which was sparsely populated and difficult to navigate on foot, but that was it concerning natural obstacles. There wasn't even a river nearby. What the city _did_ have though was an insane student population, about one out of five was studying there, lots of able-bodied people in their prime with… a certain amount of genre savvy.

I can't give you the entire story first hand, as I only arrived, after the city had already gone into siege mode, but here is the short version: The university clinic was hit hard and early on, but it was rather isolated from the city proper. While everyone else made a hasty escape, the students decided to make a stand. Untrained, uncoordinated, mostly armed for melee, a motley crew of police at their back, somehow, they made it work. After the victory came the grueling discussions on how to proceed, but when I arrived with my family, there was already a rickety wall on the ring-road and the city was ready for war. It was sort of like the American Miracle at Avalon, except they had been 300. Before the refugees hit us, we were already _twenty thousand_. Engineers, doctors, technicians and lots of people halfway there. The government ignored us on the basis that we were among the very few who didn't ask them for help, but they were occasionally sending a helicopter our way to evacuate this professor or that researcher because his knowledge would be needed for the war effort somewhere else.

What we were most afraid of was the Ruhr Area to the north. It had been one of the biggest agglomerations of pre-war Europe, plus Cologne which was _between_ the Ruhr Area and us. It was sort of a consensus that this super-horde would eventually run headfirst into our walls. Outrunning that was not an option anyone would have gambled on. So we dug in and waited, on highest alert. We continued preparations, strengthened the walls, planted gardens, kept an ear to the radio, sent out scouts. It was a long wait. We had to deal with enough zed-attacks to never let our guard down, yet what we were expecting was the brutal blow of the Ruhr horde. As far as I know, no one in Aachen died from ADS, everyone was too much on edge to even think about laying down and just dying. Which was a good thing on one side, and a bad thing on the other, because that constant stress was taking its toll, too. But the hammer never dropped! **[She laughs helplessly.]** It should not have happened! We were in a densely populated country, surrounded by densely populated countries. By all means, something big had to hit us, but the biggest thing we ever got were the battles of the Clinic right after the outbreak and later Lousberg! It feels almost horrible to be so lucky.

We had to deal with wagonloads of refugees, not to mention families of students from farther away. Cell phones were headed in a bad direction, but they still worked around then. There were scans, there were trial-areas, occasionally something would get through, but it would be dealt with swiftly. We took in everyone we could possibly take in. More people meant a greater strain on resources, but it meant we could expand and have the manpower to hold the areas. So we expanded, mostly going for farmlands or lands that could be used as farmlands. Someone got the bright idea to use concrete pipes, leading from the walls to the farms that were walled in, too. That way, we didn't have to clear and hold the land in between and if a farm fell, as some of them did, we just had to seal the pipes.

Then came the Prochnow-Plan. We were ordered, all of us who had walled ourselves in at Aachen, to move towards Dusseldorf, which was of course in the middle of the Ruhr Area that we so dreaded. In hindsight, it is blatantly obvious why the Prochnow-Plan would call for a bait zone right there and survival rates were rather high, for a bait zone. The government was reasonably scared about the Ruhr horde going anywhere else and reinforced Dusseldorf almost as much as the safe zones. But when the broadcast hit, we all but laughed at it.

Yet, some of the refugees packed up and left. They argued that the government must have a plan and they did, though we could not quite figure it out at the time. What we could figure out was that the Ruhr Area was spawning one of the biggest swarms of mainland Europe and not even a Quisling would willingly go near it. To which the refugees replied: How do you know? You have been hiding in a rather backwater part of the country since the crisis hit, the only news you have are the occasional radio messages. They make it look grim, but the only news from the Ruhr Area is a welcoming call towards a safe haven.

This was a good point: We just didn't know for certain and needed to scout more efficiently and more far ranging. There was a salvaging brigade that systematically cleared the evacuated areas of the city from anything useful and occasionally ventured a little farther. There were the designated scouts, but their job was to keep a lookout for the swarm that we still very much feared was coming. That was it. And because we had fared that well up until now, people were paranoid about any kind of long-range scouting that could possibly attract unwanted attention. Cars were out, motorbikes were out, trains were out.

Now, I'm pretty sure it wasn't me, but people tend to credit yours truly with the first mention of a scouting mission in a hot air balloon. It was considered a splendid idea. The salvaging crew got their hands on a balloon easily, the techs from the university fitted it with motors so it could steer and the scouting could begin! There was a catch though, which we didn't realize until we were airborne: The balloon was too loud. Every time I used the burner, I would get a moan from below as a reward and we aborted the mission before we had cleared the city outskirts. I crash landed the damn thing on Lousberg and soon after, we had ourselves a fight with any nosy zeds who had followed us home.

Balloons were off the table after that, but the general idea stuck and there were still a lot of engineers and engineering students around. Soon enough, the airship _Kaiser Karl_ was launched. A lot was learned from that experience and lots more would be learned from the operations we undertook.

**That makes it sound rather easy.**

Well… it was. We had the facilities of a high-tech university at our disposal. They had lifting gas, they had fabrics that could form an envelope, they had everything! The machinery wasn't fit to produce on an industrial scale, but a single airship? That was more than feasible.

Once the ship was airborne was when the real problems and experience-making started. The technical front was almost harmless in comparison. We used Helium as a lifting gas, because no one was eager to launch a second Hindenburg. The university had a stockpile of canned Helium and the techs knew where the suppliers were situated, so we could get more, if we really wanted to – which we did. The first rule for any air-captain was still: Don't vent into the skies. Unless its for your lives, do not vent Helium from the envelope. It was too precious and we couldn't even start to produce it at the developing uptake-rate.

The _Kaiser Karl_ was equipped with two strong electrical motors. We paid a heavy toll in freight capacity, because of their batteries, but stealth was king, everything else was secondary. They gave us a reach of just about two hundred kilometers, which was fine for a start. Still, a means to recharge the batteries was added promptly, in the form of solar panels on the envelope. They were a pain to keep clean, but it made us captains feel a lot safer, when we ventured out. We put a lot of faith in the wind anyhow, which leads to the next point.

An airship's success rose and fell with the weather. Receiving a weather forecast was crucial, so we rigged ourselves a personal uplink to the Meteosatsa [2]. Two of them went silent after a while, but by then the captains had become rather adept at reading the skies themselves and the other two were vigorously maintained by the ISS-crew. Believe me, we sent a nice big fruit basket and a "free Printen[3] for life"-voucher to Cape Canaveral, when those guys got relieved. Anyhow, storms and strong winds could be murderous to any airship missions. They kept the fleet grounded for a good part of the winter each year. If you got hit in the open skies, standard procedure was to heave to, hunker down and sit it out. We did so by throwing every anchor we had and even winching ourselves closer to the ground, if we were certain the anchors had a firm enough hold. The motors could make some decent mileage against 5 Beaufort, anything above that was hopeless, at least with electrical engines.

We had to learn all of this from dear experience. After our first clumsy steps and our first successful little missions, we got a bit cocky. Well, the wind taught us respect. The second airship, the _Bahkauv_, tried to run a storm in early winter of the first year and was literally blown away. We didn't hear from them again and thought they had gone down. Yet three months later, they returned to port. Apparently, they had been carried as far away as Prague and had had quite the odyssey on their way home, including a visit to grey zone Berlin and secondary safe zone Rügen. While the survival of the _Bahkauv_ was admirable and a huge boost to morale, another incident had already shown us in no uncertain terms that we should not, under any circumstances, try our luck against a storm again. The incident, of course, was the crashing of the _Theodore Kármán_ in the Belgian marshes while trying to reach Antwerp. Three of the crew survived and made it back to Aachen and after their firsthand reports, we established safety measures to be taken whenever a storm was a-brewing.

**You already mentioned scouting and scavenging. Could you please elaborate?**

Certainly. First off, we simply went on scouting flights in an ever-increasing radius. We were mainly looking for zed-clusters, but soon enough other shiny things caught our eyes. A seemingly intact supermarket here, a gas station that hadn't burnt out there, we even spotted lone survivors who wanted to be picked up. Soon we started designated scavenging runs. Depending on the target, we would even ditch batteries, if that meant we could take everything on board.

We were exceptionally careful when landing people on the ground. We did an untold number of practice drills in advance, both the raiders who would fast rope from the gondola and secure the goods, and the crews who would need to keep the airship in place and adjust the trim when winching something or someone up. It was a delicate business and it took a while until it was perfected. Quick in, quick out and everything back on board. There were incidents, of course. We never lost a ship, after the _Kármán_ but we lost five raiders before the first winter, four to zeds, one to a fall from the ropes. We spent the winter training and adapting our equipment. After that, mortality rates with the Air Ship Fleet only rivalled those of the ADS-divers. We all but quadrupled safety measures to prevent another fall and for every raider on the ground, there had to be another who was always tethered; that way we could always beat a hasty retreat, what we called the "hugging take-off": the tethered raider would grab his comrade, attach him to himself while already being winched in and after everyone was safe, the "huggers" could be connected to their own lifelines. We would literally yank the prey out of the ghouls' clutches.

After the first year, after the _Bahkauv_ and the _Kármán_, after our scavenging and rescue runs, we were getting the hang of it and we started to get bold. Not, sailing straight into an Atlantic cyclone bold, but we scouted Cologne. Even 200 meters in the air, I was sweating my hands off, from the moment we spotted the Cathedral until we left again. Cologne was deep in the grey and we could see the remains of tanks, trucks and roadblocks, where the army had tried to stem the tide. My co-pilot was shaking, when we circled the south-city; he had had family there. The rope-master had withdrawn from the windows after a first look, explaining that he would never land scavengers anywhere near the city and that he personally didn't need to see the misery on the ground. Which made him just about the smartest man on board.

We didn't gather much intel from that mission, except for something crucial: We could pull off a stunt such as flying relatively low over Cologne without attracting attention. That was when we started to get megalomaniac: After what the _Bahkauv_ had endured, we prepared long-time missions, to reestablish a firm contact with any safe zones within our reach and get other bases we could operate from. For the first two years, Aachen was our only safe harbor where we could land and maintain the airships, we intended expansion.

**And that was the birth of the European Air Fleet?**

Sort-of, kind-of, not really, not yet. We were still more of an oddity, some strange, anachronistic outgrow of the apocalypse, something that people would look at and wonder why or how. The looks we got, when we first flew the _Kaiser Karl_ over the Kiel-Channel were priceless. We were wholeheartedly welcomed into the safe zone, though the officials were more bemused than anything. While they agreed to provide landing grounds and hangars for the future, they did not see our potential. We were shelved with the guys who ran the armored trains, the people of the Wartburg or that Chinese submarine: It worked for those involved, but it was nothing an entire community could rely on.

Agreed, we were completely unsuited for any airlift capacity. The airships were too dependent on the weather to provide regular help for the bait zones and we didn't have enough capacity to make it work in a slow-but-strong kind of way.

So we proved our mettle some other way: We couldn't provide much immediate help for the government, but we could help the little man. And we did. My rope-master declared me insane, but we went back into the grey zone.

**What do you mean, "the little man"?**

Survivors who didn't hold out in the bait zones. Individuals. Small fortresses that had passed under the radar. We had already picked up people on our scavenging runs around Aachen, now we started doing so on a national scale. And we were the only ones who could do _that_ reliably. Until we came along, the only means of safe extraction was the army with its helicopters. And they had used those very carefully, because they made too much of a ruckus. Well, we didn't.

We got on the radio and tried to raise people who might need a ride. All the while we were scavenging for food and necessities, so we wouldn't have to return to port that often; by then our crew was drilled like a fire company. If we spotted something useful, the raiders went down the lines, picked it up and were back, before the zeds noticed, though we always kept a healthy distance to any ghouls on the ground.

Getting people up was another thing, because they were nervous about going on the ropes and most weren't in too good a shape. But we managed. For the worst cases, one of our flight engineers had scrambled together a stretcher-contraption like they had used in pre-war air rescues and we got ourselves the real ones after returning to Schleswig. Our static altitude was still 200 meters[4]. I think I haven't stressed that point yet, because I'm accustomed to it. So were the raiders. Some of those madmen slept on the ropes in between jobs, at the halfway-point, because it took a while to winch them the entire way up.

But the poor people on the ground… they were terrified. I have never spent much time on the ropes, but I have been winched in often enough to sympathize: There is nothing you can do, as the ground slowly and steadily gets farther away from you. There is nothing around you, you're literally hanging in the air and you can't even hold on to anything, because the ropes are anchored on the back of your harness, so you can't possibly unclip yourself. If you're going up the full 200 meters, that's around three minutes of utter helplessness.

We did what we could to soothe people, particularly the children. Whenever we had the time, we would lower an anchor so they could hold onto the cable. And the raiders would usually go up along with them and provide distraction by chatting with them or holding them.

**[Janina's gaze becomes strangely empty.]** We saw a lot of carnage and destruction. We sailed the skies of a Europe that had been mauled worse than after the last World War. We were close enough to the Polish bait zone at Konin to hear the gunshots and the screams, when it was overrun. The raiders wanted to go in and safe people, the rope-master and me denied them. It was too dangerous. We saw Berlin and Munich and the burning of Prague. We saw the locks in Frankfurt, chockful with writhing ghouls. The danger was always there and always near and even up in our ship, we never felt safe. We had our close calls, too.

One time we assisted a last stand on the fringes of Wolfsburg. First, we strafed the horde from above and after that got the people on the ground a little reprieve, we landed raiders. It was a lot of frantic work, getting everyone into a harness while keeping the zeds at bay. I was only watching from above and had to steer the ship. I still don't know how they managed to get all 23 survivors, but I know that a lot of hugging take-offs were performed, that several boots were lost to zeds hitching a ride and that those badges of honor were deserved. That was a lucky case. We tried to avoid getting that familiar with ghouls, but after Konin we could no longer stand by, if it was a manageable number of people. Sadly, we overestimated "manageable" sometimes.

There were other problems, too. In Lübeck we evacuated a family with a baby, which screamed its lungs out while on the ropes. I hadn't gotten that much attention since our misguided ride on the balloon. It took almost a week of silently hovering where we were and being slowly blown out to sea, until the zeds lost interest. I wouldn't have wanted to explain to someone in charge why we had brought half of reanimated Lübeck back to the safe zone.

Slowly and steadily we got people out. Sometimes we got them on the radio, sometimes we got lucky and spotted big "Help us"-banners or something similar, at night we would watch for campfires. At first, we were limited to operations in Germany and along its borders, particularly in modern day Benelux and in Poland, because we could only stop, maintain and resupply in Aachen, Schleswig or on Rügen, the secondary German safe zone. Not to mention the Aachen Air Fleet was only ten ships strong. Yet while half of those ships were earning their stripes in the eyes of the government, the others spread around the continent. We established contact with the joint safe zone of Belgium and the Netherlands, with the Poles in Gdansk, the Swedes on Gotland and Oland, with the Alps, Felix Bernard even flew the _Friedrich Gauss_ to Brest, Edinburgh and Dublin and then, just because he could, to the Hero City and back. Around that time the European Air Fleet was slowly starting to become a reality. The Irish were the first to jump onto the bandwagon and commissioned their own airships, because they had been faring rather well themselves. The British couldn't take that in stride and started their respective program. The Alps took a liking to the idea and their airships were unveiled as a great propagandistic morale booster before the Milan-offensive, but when we first knocked on their doors, they were rather prickly. We could land there, but they wouldn't supply us nor take in anyone we had snatched up from the grey zone. The "Italian Folly"[5] was still three months off, so the Alps were at their lowest point in terms of food.

**When were you incorporated into the military?**

Ah, that's the trick: We never were. Even now I am an independent contractor. That's why I get to wear what I wear. The government acknowledged our expertise and simply asked us for help. Which we were willing and ready to supply. Once Honolulu had happened, we were working as closely with the military as if we were part of it anyways.

Even before Honolulu, we were eventually doing official jobs for the government. If they needed something specific from, let's say, an industrial complex, we would drop in raiders to get it, that is, if risk assessment wasn't through the roof. Also, as they had seen how smoothly we could get people out, they eventually wanted to get people in.

Well, to be more precise, they wanted us to take back smaller outposts. Power plants, for example. There was a nuclear one just outside the safe zone, but in the middle of the siege line of zeds[6]. First, we landed soldiers with silenced weapons and crossbows, after they had done their thing, we landed technical personnel and after _they_ had done their thing, we were sent to salvage Uranium from another shut-down power plant. Wonders abound, two weeks after the first soldier had entered the plant, lights went on again in the safe zone.

It wasn't as if we could clear a country just with airships. There were too few ships with too little carrying capacity and after a certain point it wasn't cost efficient to build more of them anymore. No, we were the commandos, the airborne corps. Our operations never took back that much land, but it was always vital in some way. We landed the troops that secured Helgoland and Fehmarn, we established the footholds in Burghausen and Hohenzollern Castle, Bernard led the British and French ships that took back the Channel Islands and the Irish, who were second in terms of airship-fleet-size, at least in the European Theatre, had their biggest victory in purging the Isle of Man. While airships were decidedly not the reason the "Italian Folly" was successful, they played a role.

In conclusion, airships were immensely useful, but they were no mayor turning point. No single invention was. I'd go to far as to call them inconsequential on a global scale, but in Europe they are still hyped as if victory would have been impossible without them. Because of the European Air Fleet. What they did… what _we_ did was saving hundreds, maybe even thousands of lives[7]. Not spectacularly, not even on a grand scale. Sometimes one by one. But we did get people out. People who are alive because of us. There are… there are children being named after me and my crew. Felix Bernard got himself a statue on Guernsey. Most of the raiders have a badge of honor, some from multiple countries. The remains of the _Kármán_ have a place in the War Museum in Brussels. And that's what I cling to, that's what I remind myself of, whenever the memories of a burnt down Europe haunt me at night, because they do and I am not ashamed to admit that. We did some good. Amongst the ruined cities and the ravaged countryside and the shambling hordes of dead bodies… we did some good. We saved lives. And… this might sound pretentious… because of the movie it's associated with and because of my damn nationality… but I like to think there is truth in the Talmud verse: He who saves one man's life, saves the world entire.

* * *

[1] The pre-war trijunction of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands became a bilateral border after the establishment of Benelux.

[2] European Meteorological satellites

[3] German gingerbread cookies typical for Aachen

[4] Using the motors and the fins, airships can dynamically alter their flight level. This can also be achieved by undoing the trim, pumping trimming water forward or aft or simply ordering the crew there. The static altitude is the flight level a trimmed ship will eventually return to.

[5] A year before the Honolulu Conference, the situation in the Alpine safe zone became so desperate, that a massive winter offensive was launched to reclaim the Po-Adda line and all the farmlands it entailed. Casualities were significant, but the venture succeeded.

[6]Brunsbüttel Nuclear Power Plant. It had already been shut down for several years.

[7] Records of the European Air Fleet's activity throughout the war are still being analyzed; the _Kaiser Karl_ under Air Captain Wirth has affirmatively rescued 248 people from grey zones in Germany, France, Benelux, Bohemia and Poland over the course of the war.

* * *

**Author Notes: I had to assume quite a lot of European safe zones, because there are only two canon ones, those of Britain and Germany. Some might be worth arguing over (particularly France and Poland) so if you, dear reader, happen to be more informed on those countries, feel free to share your knowledge and suggestions via PM. Also, as always, thank you for reading.**


End file.
